The invention relates to a system for displaying the time of day, and more particularly, to a digital time display system which operates on the decimal system.
The current clock time display system originates from the concept of dividing the period from the sunrise to the sunset into twelve equal intervals, which was established about 50th century B.C. In 17th century A.D., the original concept has been developed to dividing the period of a day into 24 equal intervals regardless of the sunrise or sunset, and one hour thus established has been divided into 6 equal intervals initially, and then into 12 equal intervals. With improvements in the accuracy of clocks, the division of one hour into 60 equal intervals has been established about the middle of 19th century A.D. and maintained until the present time. However, it is understood that the division of one hour into 60 minutes involves a difficulty of conversion. By way of example, a time period of 248 minutes must be converted into the scale of 60 to find the proper designation of four hours and eight minutes, rather than allowing the direct punctuation into two hours and forty-eight minutes which would be the case if the hour were represented in terms of the decimal system. This causes a vast amount of labor and time to be consumed in converting the cumulative labor time in factory or cumulative time in an automobile race, for example, into the more common hour and minute designation.
On the other hand, it is noted that a usual digital clock time display affords a sufficient time to recognize the display of "second" inasmuch as it steps every second. However, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to visually discriminate a fraction of one second in such display system when the increment is in unit of one-tenth of a second. Thus it will be appreciated that there is a need in the art for an improvement in the stepping rate for the least significant digit of such display system.